16 July 2024
Bilbao Campus
The Institute of Human Rights and the Basque Government presented on July 16, within the framework of the summer course “Humanizing prison: hope and challenge for the Basque penitentiary model”, the report on the injustice suffered by prison officers due to the threat of ETA (1980-2011), commissioned to the University of Deusto by the Basque Department of Equality, Justice and Social Policies. Full report.
Alfredo Jorge Suar Muro, a doctor at the El Puerto de Santamaría prison, was murdered by ETA in 1983, becoming the first prison-related fatality. Shortly afterwards, the terrorist group issued a declaration claiming responsibility and extending its threat to all prison staff.
The report, presented by the director of the Human Rights Institute of Deusto Gorka Urrutia, documents seven deadly attacks, two thwarted attacks and the kidnapping of José Antonio Ortega Lara, highlighting the suffering of officials in all Spanish prisons. The situation is analyzed in nearly fifty pages, based on interviews with a dozen prison workers in the Basque Country.
The report underlines that prison officers were one of the groups that suffered the most from ETA threats. The intensity of these threats varied according to the place of work, but in no case did they cease to be targets of the terrorist organization. This situation conditioned their lives, being the most visible threat in the three Basque prisons. This situation was a perverse anomaly, since it violated numerous fundamental rights, recognized as imperative, unrenounceable and inalienable by all democratic legal systems, both locally and internationally.
Direct and indirect threats
The testimonies gathered in the report reveal that being a target of ETA implied “direct and indirect threats”, which, due to their prolonged action over time, left an emotional impact in the form of permanent or post-traumatic stress in most of these people. The document adds that the impact on those who were and still are part of this group has entailed “a toll in terms of physical and moral integrity”. As an example, one of the interviewees recounts how in 1993 she came home “very happy” to tell her family that she had passed the competitive examination to become a prison officer, and how her father responded that she had “made their lives miserable”.
The study concludes that all these professionals, without exception, had their rights seriously violated and were victims of the ETA threat and all of them, without exception, deserve “truth, memory and recognition”. Therefore, it is necessary to repair both areas (individual and group) through a process in different phases and with common elements. Among them, it appeals to the need to reach a consensus on “a fair account of what happened that puts the unjust suffering endured by the victims first, as a way to reach a process of empathy with them”. In addition, the importance of developing a pedagogical work and dissemination of what happened is stressed.
